The first study to undertake a wide-ranging comparison of invocations of al-Andalus across the Arab and Hispanic worlds.

Around the globe, concerns about interfaith relations have led to efforts to find earlier models in Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus). This book examines how Muslim Iberia operates as an icon or symbol of identity in twentieth and twenty-first century narrative, drama, television, and film from the Arab world, Spain, and Argentina. Christina Civantos demonstrates how cultural agents in the present ascribe importance to the past and how dominant accounts of this importance are contested. Civantos’s analysis reveals that, alongside established narratives that use al-Andalus to create exclusionary, imperial identities, there are alternate discourses about the legacy of al-Andalus that rewrite the traditional narratives. In the process, these discourses critique their imperial and gendered dimensions and pursue intercultural translation.

Christina Civantos is Associate Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami and the author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity, also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments Notes on Transliteration, Translation, and Terminology

Introduction: Shared Legacies and Connected Histories Part I: Cultural (Un)Translatability and Narratives of Identity In Representations of Ibn Rushd/Averroes

1. Borges and His Arab Interlocutors: Orientalism, Translation, and Epistemology

2. Ibn Rushd and Freedom of Expression: The Construction and Fragmentation of Identity Narratives Part II: To and from al-Andalus: Migration and Coloniality

3. The Migration of a Hero: The Construction and Deconstruction of Tariq Ibn Ziyad

4. Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad XII (Boabdil) and Other Migrants

Coda: Columbus and Coloniality Part III: Florinda, Wallada, and “Scheherazade,” Or The Women of al-Andalus and the Stories They Tell